Last week, the Trump administration sent to nine universities A Compact for Excellence in Higher Education, the idea being that institutions that sign on to the compact would receive “preferential access to federal funds.” This is the latest effort by Trump to gain control over higher ed, which is part of the larger project of commandeering American culture on behalf of MAGA values – i.e., white, male, Christian-nationalist dominance. (That, at any rate, is the project of Trump’s “handlers.” I suspect that for Trump himself, like everything else, it has to do with power, revenge, and adulation.)

The compact itself is of course a wolf barely in sheep’s clothing, a grab bag of right-wing fantasies about how to reshape universities and to indoctrinate students in MAGA jingoism. Many have already condemned it, including the American Council of Learned Societies.

Predictably, the University of Texas board – the MAGAist of boards appointed by the MAGAist of governors in one of the MAGAist of states – has expressed enthusiasm for the compact. It is a real tragedy to watch Texas, with its host of fine institutions, go the way of Florida in ransacking higher education.

Whether any of the other nine institutions follows suit remains to be seen. That list comprises Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, Arizona, Penn, USC, Virginia, and Vanderbilt. Frankly, if any of these institutions caves, it will signal something very bad. We’re at a tipping point, with some recent stiffening of the backbone of American higher ed, in the face of Trump’s assaults; we cannot afford backsliding.

Indeed, as Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell points out in today’s New York Times: the administration with this move “wanted to signal strength. Instead, it’s revealing its weakness. The administration’s need to break the academy is forcing it to make a desperately risky gamble.” He elaborates:

The administration would have played its cards differently if it had a stronger hand. Its best outcome would have been a private deal under which the nine universities announced simultaneously that they were signing onto the compact. Such an announcement might indeed have panicked other universities around the country.

That this didn’t happen suggests that the administration’s threats aren’t enough on their own to compel submission.

Farrell’s larger point is this: authoritarians seek to gain control of civil society through threats, intimidation, selective use of force that “divide and conquer” any opposition. But if enough of the public and institutions of civil society hang together against the threats, no authoritarian can ultimately overcome them.

So please, Brown et al., stay solid!